And yet it was nothing more than trickery and lies — they wanted only to lay waste to me and plunder me.

After some months they returned, they came on and all, with everything their mothers and fathers had left them.

They enslaved my beautiful children, put them to forced work. And they all began to die, my children, because they weren’t used to that kind of work — they were used to lying around all the blessed day eating roasted meat in their paradise.

They signed a treaty so they could mistreat me.

When at last all my children, the Indians, had died, the foreigners left to go buy Africans. They returned with them on great ships known as Négriers.

These men and women were so humiliated, abused. They were calles slaves, which is like being an object, a piece of property with a master. These slaves worked from sunrise to sunset, and could even be slaughted and fed to the beasts.

All of my wealth and economy rested on the backs of these slaves, working in the sugar cane fields, in the sugar factories, making bread, as “slaves of talent,” as domestic slaves.

It was salvation when the Rights of Man were declared, sayng that everyone should live free, that there would no longer be slaves and masters.

This was the beginning of the end of slavery in Haiti.

On Breda’s plantation there lived a man named Toussaint. He fought as hard as he was able to deliver his countrymen from slavery, but alas, the struggle was greater than his ability to create dialogue, and in the end he had to take up arms instead.

I think that dialogue would have been better for me than armed struggled, because what remained of my riches would have been better preserved for my children.

Dessalines, again, took up the struggle for a better system. He beheaded, burned houses. After the ceremony at Bois Caiman, many homes were burned; many shots were fired.

On November 18, 1803, at the battle of Ravine-à-Couleuvres, many French fell, and many of my riches were destroyed.

In 1804, I was born a country. A country plunged into economic crises, political crises, social crises.

The political and social crises made a lot of blood flow. In 1805, Dessalines killed what remained of the French on the pretext that they were spies of the former métropole.

However, he too would be killed, in 1806, because of his land reform policies.

And nonetheless, the small peasants who had liberated me claimed my land as their own, and Dessalines was against administrative corruption and seized all the ownerless land to be controlled by the state.

We knew the mulatres would demand the land their fathers had left for them, and those mulatres joined forces with the small peasants.

They killed Dessalines on October 17, 1806. After that, there was the Battle of Sibert, and I had two presidents, one in the west and the south, and one in the north. When they at last died, Boyer took advantage of this respite to pay my debts off and reunite the island that had been divided in two.

If you see that I am telling of my trials and tribulations, it’s because I yearn for change. Change in all realms, political, economic, and social. You must respect my constitution.

Which is to say:

1. Elections must be honest and credible, organized every time a government has finished its mandate.
2. We must stop this system of politicians filling their pockets from state coffers; it only leads to more suffering.
3. We must break this system of unemployment. Unemployment leads people to commit dishonest acts, to protest in the streets, to engage in violent dechoukaj.
4. We must have universities and high schools so my young people can be educated.
5. We must have a national reconciliation so everyone can be equal, and the dyaspora should come home so they can help me, especially in this period of my reconstruction.

If we do all this, I will become more beautiful, I will not fall apart, I will be able to withstand hurricanes and earthquakes.

There are things that pass before me that hurt me — when people kill one another, or when hurricanes carry my children out to sea, this hurts me greatly.

I want to escape from this state I am in now, but that depends on you.

In putting your heads together, in living as brothers and sisters, in knowing one another’s suffering, you will make me more beautiful.

And when that happens, other countries will flock to me, your desires will be realized, and being Haitian will mean having a flag.